While analog audio and video content may produce a higher quality reproduction, DAV content continues to become more popular. Several reasons exist for the popularity of DAV content that include the ongoing improvement of data sampling and generation of the DAV content itself. The continual development of consumer devices that play the created digital DAV content also contributes to the popularity. Additionally, the ease of reproducing and distributing the digital DAV content to the various devices compared to analog data contributes to the popularity thereof.
With the ease of reproducing and distributing the DAV content comes the concern of digital copying. The entertainment industry is especially concerned due to the possibility of high resolution copies of DAV content being mass distributed. As such, manufacturers developed digital copy protection schemes and components to protect against copying DAV content when being distributed.
Intel Corporation of Santa Clara, Calif., developed a digital copy protection scheme known as High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP) to protect the transfer of DAV content from a video source, such as a computer, a satellite television receiver or DVD player, to a receiver, such as a display.
The HDCP scheme or system is meant to prevent HDCP-encrypted content from being played on devices that do not support HDCP or which have been modified to copy HDCP content. Before sending data, a transmitting device checks that the receiver is authorized to receive it. If so, the transmitter encrypts the data to prevent eavesdropping while the digital data is transmitted to the receiver. Several different connections that are HDCP compliant can be used to connect the source to the end device.